Also, the personal invasion had now extended to her home. In the phrase beloved of gangster movies, the enemy ‘knew where she lived’. A gate at the back of her garden led to an alleyway behind the houses of the High Street. It was only locked by a bolt which could be easily reached from outside. Someone had opened the gate and crossed her back garden to stuff the missive under the door to her kitchen. Knowing that was not a nice feeling.

Carole needed to be busy. She always needed to be busy, to keep unpleasant thoughts at bay. And her current thoughts were so unpleasant that she need more than ever to be busy. She checked her watch. Less than an hour had elapsed since she left Shefford’s. The windscreen repair man would hardly have arrived at the garage, let alone finished the job. It was the perfect opportunity to sort out the insurance.

The documents were neatly filed in her upstairs study, which had been designed by the architect who built High Tor as a second spare bedroom. And it was occasionally used as such, on the rare occasions when her son Stephen, daughter-in-law Gaby and two adored granddaughters, Lily and Chloe, all came to Fethering at the same time. Then the adult visitors would stay in the twin-bedded spare room and the little girls would sleep on fold-out mattresses in the study.

Everything in her workspace was neatly filed. It was a legacy from the time Carole had spent working at the Home Office. There, she had been constantly commended for her efficiency and in her Fethering retirement, though there was no one to witness it, she still prided herself on that efficiency.

Her filing cabinet stood to one side of the table on which sat her laptop. The machine, whose purchase had been long resisted but was now an essential part of Carole’s life, had rarely had its portability put to the test. She treated it like a desktop computer. Inside her compartmentalized mind, doing things online was an activity to be pursued in her study, not in any other part of the house. And the laptop was certainly never used for entertainment, music or television streaming. Its exclusive purposes were the sending of emails and the occasional fact-checking foray into Wikipedia.

Practical activities, like contacting insurance companies, also belonged in the study. The downstairs phone and the bedside one, on the same landline, were used for social purposes, which meant not very often (except for calls to the Fulham home of Stephen, Gaby and the granddaughters). Carole Seddon’s mobile was rarely used at all, and certainly not when she was inside High Tor. As she would say tartly, if asked about the subject, ‘I am not of the generation that needs to consult their screen every five minutes.’ Everything within Carole Seddon’s life had very strict rules.